Wednesday, October 19, 2016

I Don’t Believe in Killer Clowns


Forget Donald Trump, forget drugged Halloween candy, forget climate change – everyone knows the real threat this Halloween is killer clowns.
Or is it?
People have been reporting alleged clown sightings all over the country, including one woman who lied about a killer clown attack so she wouldn’t get in trouble for being late to work. I should totally use that excuse to cancel class some morning. “Dear students: I’m writing to let you all know that we won’t be having class today because I was attacked by a clown, and I threw my back out beating him to death with his own arm.”

Let’s be real – everyone’s afraid of clowns. A University of Sheffield study of 250 patients at a children’s hospital found that the poor little sick kids “universally disliked” clowns. The researchers went out of their way to point out that “even the older children” professed a dislike of clowns, as if they, the researchers, were baffled by this result for some reason.

Given the state of America today, I think if people were really dressing up as clowns to scare their neighbors, there’d be some dead f&cking clowns by now. You can get shot in this country for literally no reason. On a scale of “went to the movies” to “attended school,” dressing up as a creepy clown comes in at about eleventy-three in terms of “reasons to shoot somebody in America.” And yet, there’ve been dozens of “creepy clown” news stories and not a single “dead clown” report.
Supporting this argument is the fact that the clowns have now spread in West Virginia. I saw a screenshot of a Facebook status purportedly made by a woman who lives a few miles away from me. Allegedly, a clown walked into her kitchen while she was eating with her family. When it (she used the word “it”) saw them it supposedly ran back outside and hid behind the neighbor’s tree, peering at them. I was skeptical, and so was the manfriend, because the post didn’t end with, “And then I shot it.” I mean, this is West Virginia we’re talking about here. People take their shotguns to the dinner table in West Virginia. You have to, because at literally any moment, there might be a bear.

Besides, as the manfriend pointed out, a clown costume isn’t something you just throw on in five minutes. It takes time and a certain level of skill to paint the tortured features of the damned over your own. That’s not something you do just so you can skulk around in the woods and probably get shot.
Or is it?